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en-usFri, 22 Feb 2019 07:09:08 -0800Fri, 22 Feb 2019 07:09:08 -0800It’s time for Apple to get back into the smart home in a big wayWed, 20 Feb 2019 03:00:00 -0800Jason SnellJason Snell

Apple’s current strategy in the home tech market is a bit murky. It launched the HomePod and Apple TV 4K in 2017, and HomeKit support seems to have become much more widespread lately, but it also killed the AirPort line of products and has stood by as competitors like Google and Amazon snap up companies like Nest and Eero.

I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Ahrendts featuring aspects of the Apple Store experience that actually preceded her. No, she didn’t invent the where’s-the-line, where-do-I-stand set-up that completely breaks everything we ever learned about how to behave in a retail store. Under her tenure the approach was modified, not discarded, and in recent years I’ve noticed a more aggressive positioning of employees at the front of stores to intercept new shoppers and put them in the right place.

Apple’s next operating system update, iOS 13, will include… iPad-specific upgrades like a new home screen, the ability to tab through multiple versions of a single app like pages in a web browser, and improvements to file management.

That’s a lot of information distilled into a small paragraph, but what jumped out at me most is the idea that the iPad’s home screen—which has spent almost nine years using a spaced-out version of the iPhone’s design—might finally be getting a redesign that addresses the fact that the iPad isn’t the same device as the iPhone.

Apple’s holiday quarter of calendar-year 2018 was, by most measures, incredibly successful. Revenue of $84.3 billion, $20 billion of that profit. The second largest quarter in Apple history. And yet, the fact is, Apple’s holiday quarter was down five percent from the previous-year’s holiday quarter, and iPhone revenue dropped 15 percent year-over-year. And when the iPhone is hurting, Apple is hurting.

Here are some observations from Apple’s financial results for its fiscal first quarter of 2019 and Tuesday’s customary hourlong conference call between Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri and a gaggle of Wall Street financial analysts.

Perhaps the most important feature of the modern era of the smartphone is the camera. The operating systems are mature, the processors and data connections are fast, the apps are plentiful, and the high-resolution screens are large and brilliant. Having a camera with us wherever we go has changed how we view the world and share our lives with others, and the thin shell of a smartphone puts some pretty severe limitations on photography.

Compared to a decade ago, of course, today’s smartphone cameras offer eye-poppingly good image quality. But if you’re shopping for a new smartphone, the camera matters—and the competition is fierce. For years, Apple has promoted the iPhone as offering a high-quality camera, even if it didn’t always match up to competitors with more raw megapixels. But if Apple did possess the smartphone camera throne, it feels like it’s lost it in the last year or two.

Much has been written—a lot of it by me, admittedly—about how Apple’s commitment to let iOS developers bring their apps to macOS in 2019 has the potential to dramatically change the Mac. But adding iOS apps to the Mac might not be where Apple stops. What if the company uses macOS 10.15 (or, dare I suggest, macOS 13?) to further unify the interfaces of its platforms?

For all the discussion about whether iOS apps running on a Mac can possibly live up to the platform’s interface standards, it’s entirely possible that this year, Apple will choose to redefine what it is to be Mac-like in a way that turns iOS and macOS into a continuum of interface decisions that are all, for lack of a better phrase, “Apple-like.” Longtime Mac users might chafe, but iOS users might welcome it. As someone who is both, I am not sure where I fall, but it’s worth considering just what Apple might do to make the Mac more closely resemble iOS.

Apple doesn’t officially participate in the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but this year it’s all over the show. That’s because Apple has been cutting deals with major TV manufacturers to embed support for AirPlay 2 (and in at least one case, the iTunes movie and TV stores) in their 4K HDR televisions, and CES is when TV manufacturers make big announcements.

I’ve heard from some people who are baffled about why Apple would make it so that people aren’t forced to buy an Apple TV in order to get access to Apple’s video content. Those people are, quite frankly, thinking about an Apple that no longer exists, namely one that’s committed to making money on high-margin hardware sales.

I’m on the record with my hopes and dreams for the Mac in 2019; for my money, it’s going to be a huge year of change on the Mac side. But what about on iOS, home of Apple’s two best-selling products, the iPhone and iPad?

Not to worry. I’ve got hopes and dreams there too. There’s much to do, so let’s dive in.

An iPhone reckoning?

As I write this, Apple has just announced that it’s missing its initial forecast for the holiday quarter 2018 based in large part on lower than expected iPhone sales.

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iPhone/iPadiOSSiriSmartphonesTabletsWhy 2019 could be an enormous year of change for the MacThu, 27 Dec 2018 03:00:00 -0800Jason SnellJason Snell

2019 is shaping up to be a big year for the Mac, and I don’t just mean a year where there are a bunch of new Mac models released, along with a macOS update, like almost every other year. This could be the year that everything changes. It’s potentially the most tumultuous year since the transition from the original Mac OS to Mac OS X.

So here’s my annual mix of prediction and wishcasting for the Mac in the coming year.

The Mac Pro arrives at last

Apple has done all 2019 look-ahead columns the great service of preannouncing the new Mac Pro (in 2017!) and, this year, admitting that it would arrive in 2019. The company has also said that it will be releasing its own external display, so no points for guessing that one, either.

Here we are, another 525,600 minutes gone by, and it’s time for an annual look into the crystal ball to try and catch a glimpse of the things I’d like to see from Apple in 2019. But before we unpack a nice, fresh crystal ball, it’s time to take this grimy old crystal ball and smash it into a million pieces.

Or to put it another way, this is my annual opportunity to review my hopes and dreams for the Mac and the iPhone and iPad in 2017 and see which ones came true in 2018—and which ones were crushed flat by the steamroller of fate.

I probably used the original Apple Pencil for no more than an hour, total, during its entire existence. I don’t draw. I avoid writing by hand whenever possible. My penmanship is awful. The moment my teachers began accepting printed essays, I stopped writing them in longhand. I have never had a good relationship with pens and pencils; why should the Apple Pencil be any different?

And yet... something funny happened upon the release of the new 11- and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models with the second-generation Apple Pencil. I gave the new Pencil a try. And I’ve used it more in the past five weeks than in the three years that I kept the original Apple Pencil... well, it’s around here somewhere, if I can find it, but it’s probably not charged, anyway.

Just how big is Amazon’s announcement last week that Apple Music is coming to Echo devices? It all depends on if you see it as something larger about how Apple is prioritizing its subscription services compared to its traditional focus on making money by selling hardware.

The cold war between Amazon and Apple seems to be thawing at last. Amazon’s Prime Video app finally arrived on Apple TV late last year. Apple devices are widely available on Amazon thanks to a new deal between the two companies. And now there’s this new wrinkle, in which Amazon will become the second third-party speaker vendor (after Sonos) to offer support for Apple Music.

You might have missed it between all the turkey brining and Black Friday sales, but last week The Information reported that Apple considered making a tiny AppleTV “stick” similar to those made by competitors like Amazon and Roku.

Up to now, Apple has been steadfast in holding the line on Apple TV pricing. When the company introduced the Apple TV 4K, it didn’t even drop the price on the fourth-generation model—they’re still both for sale, at starting prices of $149 and $179 respectively.

Compare that to the competition: You can buy a Fire TV Stick for $40 and a 4K version for $50, and comparable devices from Roku cost $30 and $40, respectively. Yes, these sticks are underpowered compared to Apple’s box—Roku’s Apple TV equivalent box is $100—but no matter how you measure it, Apple’s not competitive in the TV box market when it comes to price.

Reviewers can’t agree if the iPad Pro can be used for “real work” or not, but there’s one thing they all seem to agree on: the new iPad Pro hardware is great and Apple needs to invest in upgrades for iOS to take advantage of it.

But what form should those upgrades should take? Leave it to reader Mike R from Twitter to boil this down to the right answer: It’s time for a David Letterman-style Top 10 List. So here it is, ready to be delivered to the home office in Cupertino, California, the Top 10 iPad Features We’d Like To See in iOS 13...

10. Menu Bar mode

Apple

Using an iPad Pro with an external display would be better if UI improvements were made.

There’s been a lot written about the potential merging together of the software that runs (and runs on) the Mac and the iPad. 2019 is shaping up to be a huge year, as Apple’s devices get closer together than they’ve ever been before.

But while the focus on Apple’s smooshing together of its platforms has been primarily about the software (iOS apps running on the Mac) and hardware (the potential of future Macs running Apple-designed ARM processors), the new MacBook Air got me thinking about another way Apple’s approach to iPads and iPhones may dramatically change how we shop for Macs in the future.

As long as it’s black

The new $1,199 base-model MacBook Air comes with a 1.6GHz dual-core Core i5 processor with Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz. If you max out all of its specs, on the other hand, you’ll walk away with a $2,600 computer… with the very same 1.6GHz processor. Apple will let you expand storage (to 1.5TB) and memory (to 16GB), but the processor you get is the processor you get.

There was a time when magnets were the most terrifying things in computing. Magnets erased floppy disks and tape cassettes and even hard drives. But in the modern era, magnets are our friends. Apple has used them for various important tasks over the years, from the convenient breakaway charging cable of MagSafe to the sensor that knows you’ve closed your MacBook’s lid—and the attraction that helps keep it closed.

In the last few years, Apple has brought the rules of magnetic attraction to the Apple Watch, the iPhone, and now the iPad. How do they work? You don’t need to know to appreciate what magnets do for modern Apple devices. And that goes double for the new iPad Pro, with its 102 magnets—as cited in Apple’s launch video about the product, no less—and all of the magnetic accessories that go along with it.

It’s another record quarter as a part of a record fiscal year for Apple. The revenue was nearly $63 billion, the profit more than $14 billion, and for the year Apple generated $265 billion in revenue and nearly $60 billion in profit. It’s the company’s eighth straight quarter of revenue growth, and that growth has accelerated every one of those quarters. This is a healthy company; you couldn’t find a healthier one if you tried.

Yes, Apple’s stock is getting hit because its guidance—the amount of money it expects to make during the current quarter—is actually slightly below what Wall Street analysts were expecting. For the record, the revenue Apple has guided to—between $89 and $93 billion—would be the most revenue Apple has ever generated in a quarter, and somewhere between 1 and 5 percent growth. In other words, get ready for another record Apple quarter, because this one’s shaping up to be huge.

The iPhone XR is available for pre-orders now and it officially arrives in stores on Friday. I got my hands on one Wednesday and after using it for a few hours, my initial impression is that it’s going to be a mainstream hit that pleases buyers while also improving Apple’s bottom line. Let’s dive in.

It’s got the looks

This is a gorgeous phone. It’s available in six colors, and while the black and white models look very much like the phones Apple has been releasing for the last few years, the blue, coral, Product(RED), and yellow models absolutely do not. When laying screen up on a table, you can still see the colored aluminum frame around the edges. But flip it over—or hold it in your hand—and the shiny glass colored back pops out with enormous personality. I took possession of the coral model, which lies somewhere between pink and orange on the spectrum, and it’s spectacular.

So it’s official. Photoshop—real Photoshop—is coming to the iPad next year. If you’re someone who uses Photoshop, uses the iPad to get work done, or both, this is big news. It’s a huge shot in the arm for the iPad Pro and another sign of where Apple’s platforms are going in the future. In 2019, iOS apps aren’t just coming to the Mac—one of the biggest and most important Mac apps is coming to iOS.

The power of the familiar

Most of the time when I mention Photoshop around my fellow computer nerds, it’s met with a raised eyebrow. Lots of tech people dislike Adobe’s pioneering of the software subscription route, and there are numerous alternatives to Photoshop out there. On the Mac alone, there are excellent apps like Acorn and Pixelmator Pro.

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PhotoshopiPhone/iPadPhotographySoftwareAdobe SystemsiPadUSB-C on the iPad Pro: What it could mean for usersWed, 10 Oct 2018 12:00:00 -0700Jason SnellJason Snell

The rumors of new iPad Pros keep swirling. Most recently we got a report from 9to5Mac saying that the new iPads would break with past models in several ways, including support for a new Apple Pencil, removing a physical home button in favor of Face ID, replacing the Smart Connector with a new magnetic connector, and replacing Lightning with USB-C.

Would this the beginning of a transition away from Lightning? Or is it another way for Apple to reinforce that the iPad Pro is more like a computer and less like an iPhone? Moving the iPad Pro to USB-C is potentially a huge move—though it’s also potentially a whole lot of nothing. Let’s take a look at the possibilities.

The state of the Apple Watch is good. Tim Cook continues to hail its popularity, albeit without any hard sales figures. Most pundits felt it outshined the iPhone at last month’s Apple media event. The new Apple Watch Series 4 seems to have been received well by reviewers. watchOS 5 is a successful update that enables all sorts of new capabilities.

And yet one vitally important aspect of the Apple Watch seems to not be getting the attention it deserves within Apple. In fact, one might argue that it’s the most important part of how we interact with the Apple Watch. And you see it every single time you flip your wrist and check the time.

MacOS Mojave is here, and with it, Apple is now officially shipping four Mac apps that were written for iOS and run using a translation system that Apple’s planning on rolling out to app developers next year.

But while it’s fun to consider what apps from the iOS App Store might come to the Mac App Store in 2019, it’s also worth asking what else Apple might bring to macOS next year—and whether it might have some unexpected benefits for iPad users in the process.

This system needs to improve

Let’s start with the obvious: This entire project of bringing iOS apps to the Mac is a work in progress. As Apple said on stage at WWDC in June, perhaps the best way for Apple to understand the scope of work that’s required to allow iOS apps to reside on the Mac is for the company to apply that technology to its own apps. So in macOS Mojave, we have News, Home, Voice Memos, and Stocks.

In the aftermath of last week’s Apple announcements, it’s so easy to refer to the $749 iPhone XR as a low-price, bargain model, in contrast to the $999 iPhone XS and the $1,099 iPhone XS Max. But just three years ago, $749 was what Apple charged for the most expensive new iPhone in its product line, the iPhone 6s Plus.

It’s never been more expensive to walk into an Apple store and walk out with an iPhone. Changes in the way wireless carriers approach their customers have led, unsurprisingly, to changes in the buying behavior of those same smartphone users. The change in buying patterns then affects Apple, which makes its own changes to compensate.

Sure, there’s ample underground parking and free food, but the biggest attraction at any Apple media event is the chance to get your hands on new Apple products more than a week before they go on sale to the general public. I was there at Apple Park on Wednesday to see (and use) Apple’s latest iPhones and Apple Watch. Here’s what I learned.

iPhone X, everywhere

A year ago, Apple declared the iPhone X the future of the smartphone. From the perspective of September 2017, this is the future—and the biggest story out of Wednesday’s event is that all of Apple’s new iPhones are a part of the iPhone X family. Every single one of them has glass front and back, with edge-to-edge screens and Face ID. If you buy a 2018-model iPhone, you will be buying an iPhone X—and flipping up from the bottom of the screen with your thumb to unlock rather than pressing a home button.

We’re a week away from Apple’s next big event. While Macworld’s own Jason Cross did an excellent job of detailing what we expect to see, here are a bunch of smaller details I’ll be watching for carefully from my seat in the Steve Jobs Theater.

What’s the Apple Watch focus?

The unveiling of the Apple Watch four years ago this month painted the device’s possibilities with a pretty broad canvas, and as time has gone on, the conventional wisdom seems to agree that Apple wasn’t quite sure what part of the watch would resonate with customers, so it loaded in lots of features and waited to see the results.

Back in March I wrote a column for Macworld called “MacBook Air: Why won’t it die?” I got a lot of angry feedback from people who apparently read the headline and not the article and evisioned me as the executioner of their beloved laptop.

I’m about as far away from that as I could possibly be. I have loved and used the MacBook Air from the time the first one shipped ten years ago. My point back in March was actually that Apple has been trying to kill the MacBook Air for a few years now—ever since the 12-inch MacBook was first released—but has never managed to finish it off.

This is a weird time in the technology world. The traditional PC, strong for four decades, is on the wane. The smartphone is dominant, devices so powerful that they can rival the power found in those traditional PCs. We’re rapidly exiting the era where devices were differentiated based on raw computing power, and entering one where ergonomics becomes a defining factor.

(No, I’m not saying that there aren’t cases where PCs still have more power than phones. I’m saying that away from high-performance edge cases, the differences are increasingly small.)

If we accept that an iPhone can do most of the work that most people need a computing device to do, where does that leave the iPad and the Mac? It means that they’re defined by their shapes, by how we control them and hold them and look at them. A MacBook is a good choice because it’s got a big screen attached to a hardware keyboard and a trackpad. An iPad is a good choice because it’s got a much larger screen.

This week, Apple removed Group FaceTime from the beta for iOS 12 and macOS Mojave. The company indicated that the feature will not appear in the initial release, but will rather appear in a subsequent update released later in the year.

For people who were excited about audio and video chats with multiple friends, this is a bummer. (I heard from several people who said their kids were especially looking forward to using the feature, or were using it in the beta period and were sad that it’s going to be removed for a little while.)

But I’m a little less down on Apple making this decision. Every time I used Group FaceTime in the iOS and macOS betas, it was far from flawless. I had connection problems, video and audio would disappear and reappear at random, sometimes a person would appear multiple times in my view (or disappear altogether), and there were numerous cosmetic defects to the interface, too. It seemed... very beta. And clearly someone at Apple decided it was just not going to be solid enough by release time.

If the rumors are true—and they are often, if not always—Apple is preparing to release a new generation of iPad Pro models this fall. I bought the first-generation 12.9-inch iPad Pro back in 2015 and still use it as my primary portable computer, so I’m excited at the rumors of a major iPad Pro redesign. Let’s sift through the rumors and reports and see if we can figure out where the iPad Pro is headed next.

Getting bigger and smaller

According to supply-chain sleuth Ming-Chi Kuo, the new iPad Pros will feature 11-inch and 12.9-inch screens. This continues a trend of upsizing the smaller iPad Pro model, which was introduced in early 2016 as a 9.7-inch model (the traditional iPad size), then replaced with a 10.5-inch version in 2017.

It’s gotten to the point where even some of my colleagues who write about Apple are bored by the company’s quarterly results. Granted, this is the good kind of boring—the best third-quarter results ever, led by overall revenue of $53.3 billion, a 17 percent growth rate. But it does seem like Apple does the same thing almost every quarter: growth, billions, the works. There’s not a lot of drama in being one of the most valuable companies in the world continuing to churn away at huge profits and product growth.

Still, I’m not going to call this boring. Every three months, Apple has to reveal things about itself that it would probably want to keep secret, and these disclosures can help us understand the company and its products better than we otherwise would. Here are the four most interesting things I gleaned from Tim Cook’s performance on his quarterly conference call with analysts.